Finding family in strange places.

#NaNoPrep Season Is Upon Us: Ideas & Context

As a Municipal Liaison for my NaNoWriMo region, I try to get things going at the start of September with prompts, advice, and helpful story-building whatnot. We’re currently going through Michael Stackpole’s 21 Days to a Novel as a group. Good stuff, but it doesn’t follow how I work.

What do you need to write a novel in a month? What do you really need before you start?

Time. Writing is an activity that requires uninterrupted time in blocks of at least 15 minutes. You can certainly pause for 1 minute to jot down a sentence, but you won’t meet the daily goal by doing so, and your project will lack coherence.

A writing medium. Anything that lets you record words generated by your brain into a reviewable format is fine. I write on a laptop. Some folks dictate. Others go old school and use a pad of paper. Someday, we’ll use datajacks with an ASIST interface. It’ll still be writing.

Ideas. For most writers, this is the easy part.

Technical stuff. Plot, characters, setting, etc. This is where the novel actually comes from. Some folks need all the technical things to start, others only need a few.

#1 & 2 are pretty straightforward. Either you can make time or you can’t. Either you have something to write with or you don’t. It’s #3 & 4 that trip people up.

What is an Idea?

We all know what ideas are–seeds for greater things. But how do you make your ideas coherent and usable? It’s all fine and dandy to see a a gif of a cat knocking books off a shelf and thinking that’d make a great story somehow. Converting it into a story idea is the tricky part.

Because no one really cares about a cat knocking books off a shelf. Most folks find it amusing, but there’s no actual story. It’s a cat acting like a cat. Whoopie-ding-fizz. No story there.

To make this a story, you have to do something important: place it in a context.

Context is how stories happen. Why is the cat up there? Whose bookshelf is that? What happened 5 seconds before this gif? How about 5 seconds after? Expand to 30 seconds. 3 minutes. Is this Earth as we know it? Does magic exist in this gif’s world? Is the cat sentient? Was it chasing something? Escaping something?

So many ways to take that story once you start considering the context.